Women's History Museum of Zambia
The Women's History Museum of Zambia (WHMZ) is a contemporary digital collection aimed at reclaiming African women's history and indigenous knowledge. The collection comprises over 5,000 digital pieces presenting women's history with through an African lens.
Background
[edit]
The Women's History Museum project was established in 2016 with the aim to curate objects to tell the story of Zambian women from an African perspective.[1][2] Museum founders Samba Yonga and Mulenga Kapwepwe found that much of the narrative of women in Zambia, and Africa more broadly was distorted through a colonialist lens.[3][4] There was a need for African women to reclaim their identity and present their history from their own perspective.[5] The digital museum allows the collection's curators to draw on indigenous knowledge and to present pieces that have meaning to the communities they serve.[6][7][8] Similarly, the museum's organizers have shared how the WHMZ's digital collections can serve as an opportunity to virtually repatriate objects to their native communities.[9][10]
After its founding, the Museum partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation in an effort to train Zambian writers to document the stories of Zambian women for Wikipedia. However, the organizers soon ran into difficulties as the oral traditions of the country did not adhere to norms regarding documentation and reliable sourcing.[1]
Museum co-founder Mulenga Kapwepwe shared some of the frustrations behind the project and the importance of the museum in raising awareness,
“Our oral traditions are how we’ve kept our history consistent and constant – in poetry, praise names, village names. We have real reference points that Wikipedia doesn’t recognize...When you write about an African woman who’s never been written about, Wikipedia just says she’s not important and ignores her.”[1]
Collections and impact
[edit]To date, the Museum has collected over 5,000 digital pieces of storytelling from the 1940s to the present day.[2] The museum's collections will form a permanent collection to be housed at the Lusaka National Museum.[2] The museum had made strategic use of digital collections to widen access to their collections and to make art accessible to marginalized communities.[4]
The Women's History Museum of Zambia has established a number of partnerships with international museums and project partners to share knowledge and build their collections. The WHMZ's “Shared Histories” project uses digitized works to enable both African and international visitors the opportunity to explore a wider variety of works with added context.[4]
In 2019, the Women's History Museum of Zambia formed a creative partnership with the consortium of Swedish museums led by the National Museum of World Culture (including Museum of Ethnography, Sweden) to challenge and reimagine the colonial history of their collections.[11] The collaboration has led to several partnered exhibitions between the institutions.[12] The WHMZ has since partnered with other institutions, including the European Union's Deconfining project to further elevate their work and tell the stories of African women.[13]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ a b c "On How to Protect Women's Stories". Contemporary And (in German). Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ a b c "The Museum of Women's History in Zambia is changing how a whole country sees itself". Quartz. 2019-03-09. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ "Women's History Museum Zambia". Lubuto Library Partners. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ a b c Roters, Annalena (2023-06-15). "What the Art World Can Learn from Zambia's Women's History Museum". Art Düsseldorf. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ "Zambia's Museum of Women's History – AWB". Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ Banda, Dennis; Kapwepwe, Mulenga (2020-09-28). "The influence of rurality and its indigenous knowledge on teaching methods in higher education – lessons from Ukulange Mbusa of the Bemba people of Zambia". Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. 4 (2): 197–217. doi:10.36615/sotls.v4i2.148. ISSN 2523-1154.
- ^ "The Zambian Women's History Museum is Returning to Africans What Colonialism Stole | OkayAfrica". www.okayafrica.com. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ "The Women's History Museum of Zambia in cyberspace". Europeana PRO. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ "The Next Horizon". American Alliance of Museums. 2024-11-13. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ Victoria Phiri Chitungu and Samba Yonga, Livingstone Museum and Women’s History Museum, Zambia. "Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations Sharing Digital Heritage: The Case of a Digital Repatriation in the Gwembe Valley of Zambia" The Next Horizon of Museum Practice. 2024.
- ^ "Zambiaresan". Världskulturmuseerna (in Swedish). Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ "Banji Chona & Women's History Museum Zambia". Planetary Patchwork. 2023-02-28. Retrieved 2025-02-18.
- ^ "Women's History Museum of Zambia – Deconfining". Retrieved 2025-02-18.
